Hi all –

Just a reminder that Prix Aurora Prize voting is underway and is rapidly drawing to a close.

My story, “Saturn in G Minor”–which has previously won the Writers of the Future Grand Prize–is a finalist in the Best Short Form in English category. You can read the story for free right HERE.

Any Canadian citizen anywhere in the world and all landed immigrants, as well as all attending members of Keycon/Canvention, are eligible to vote.

Mail-in paper ballots (available HERE) are due by Friday, May 9th–a mere three weeks away!

Online voting (available HERE) and on-site voting at KeyCon 25 must be completed by Saturday, May 17th at 5 pm (Central Std Time)–a slightly less mere four weeks away!

Don’t delay! Vote today!

Best,

– S.

For those of you in the GTA, there’s a great upcoming series of SF&F lectures and readings sponsored by the Toronto Public Library and (gasp!) the Canada Council.

The series, Foresight: Speculative Fiction in Canada, starts next Monday at the Lillian Smith Library (College & Spadina). Notables include Kelley Armstrong, Guy Gavriel Kay, Nalo Hopkinson, and two of my editors Cory Doctorow and Julie E. Czerneda amongst many, many others.

You can see the whole list of events here.

It all kicks off with a panel discussion with Karl Schroeder, James Alan Gardner and Peter Watts on the pursuit of foresight in Canadian science fiction. Not to be missed!

– S.

Oh, let me taste your tears! Mm, your tears are so yummy and sweet! Oh, the tears of unfathomable sadness! My-yummy!

Now I can enjoy the spring! 🙂

– S.

I was thrilled to discover my contributor copy of ESLI, the Russian science fiction magazine, in the mail yesterday–that’s the cover up above. In university I took one semester of Russian language and I discovered that I remembered just enough Russian and the Cyrillic alphabet to find my story.

The title page of my story. At the top
of the page is my name rendered in
Cyrillic characters and then the title of
the story. In Russian it translates (I think)
as “Time Borrowed”–but that works, too!

So cool!

ESLI is the same kind of newsprint digest-sized magazine as Analog or Asimov’s and the production values are very similar. I realize, too, that this is my first magazine publication of any kind–my stories have so far appeared only in anthologies. And each story also comes with an illustration on the story’s title page–and mine is spot on. I’m really pleased! I hope that ESLI will be interested in other stories of mine in future–working with them has been a wonderful experience, and a great first foreign language sale and publication.

– S.

Further to the article I posted a few weeks ago about a lawsuit trying to prevent CERN from starting up their Large Hadron Collider due to the very small risk that it might cause global destruction via a black hole or a stranglet, yesterday’s New York Times had another article about the risks posed by such high-end, high-energy physics experiments.

The article quite rightly poses the question of how one determines acceptable risks “in these surreal realms when the odds of disaster might be tiny but the stakes are cosmically high.”

Check it out here.

– S.

(PS: The article also links to some really interesting academic papers about risk assessment for these kinds of experiments. Unfortunately, you can’t get access unless you either buy the articles or have access through a university subscription to something like ProQuest. If you can get hold of them–I can because I have ProQuest access through my day job–I highly recommend them.)

There was an interesting (and slightly terrifying) article from the New York Times today about a man who has “written” 200 000 books.

Yup. 200 000.

I was prepared to despair at my lack of having finished writing even a single book until I discovered that this fellow–Philip M. Parker, a professor of management science–has used computer algorithms to trawl the internets collecting publicly available information on a subject–broad or obscure–and then, with the aid of a small army of computers and a few programmers, turned the results into books, many of them in the range of 150 pages and produced as print-on-demand only when a customer buys one. He is the ultimate long-tail retailer.

He’s used these algorithms to automate the (his words) “repetitive tasks” involved in producing a book.

Repetitive tasks. You know, like stringing words together into sentences? That kind of repetitive task.

I was prepared to laugh all this off (his customer feedback on the quality of his content sounds pretty negative from the article) until I read that he’s designing new algorithms to generate romance novels. Because, as he points out, there are “only so many body parts.”

My blood ran cold. If one type of fiction, why not others?

This reminds me of a story called “The Word Mill” by Don D’Ammassa that I read in the June 2003 issue of ANALOG. It was one of ANALOG’s short-short stories in the Probability Zero section and was a very funny tale of an author who enlists the aid of a series of artificial intelligences to do all his writing for him (you know–the repetitive bits) in multiple styles and eventually under numerous pseudonyms

Like I said, it was a fun story, I laughed at the end, but I turned the page and never thought it was possible. Even the review on Tangent called the story “amusing but slightly far-fetched.” Famous last words.

Now it turns out that there are actually jerks out there dedicated to such endeavors?

Swell.

I realize that we’re still a way away from best-selling (or even competently written) AI-authored fiction, but if there’s one thing the history of science fiction has taught me it’s that often just what you think is impossible is the stuff that ends up coming true. And sooner than you think.

At the end of the article the interviewer asks whether any of the acrostic poems Parker has had the computer generate are as good as something Shakespeare would have written.

“No,” he answers. “Only because I haven’t done sonnets yet.”

I’m glad that’s the only reason…

– S.

I was quite gratified to read this news item today–I think it means I have a shot with Natalie Portman…

– S.

This week’s bestseller rankings cover the top 20 fantasy titles for the two weeks ending March 23, 2008, as tracked by BNC SalesData. Nice to see some Canucks in the list!

– S.

1. The Children of Hurin, J.R.R. Tolkien
(HarperCollins, $17.95 pa, 9780007252268)

2. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, C.S. Lewis
(HarperCollins, $25 pa, 9780061231056)

3. Personal Demon, Kelley Armstrong
(Random House Canada, $32 cl, 9780679314851)

4. Into a Dark Realm, Raymond E. Feist
(HarperCollins, $10.99 mm, 9780060792824)

5. No Humans Involved, Kelley Armstrong
(Seal Books/Random House, $8.99 mm, 9780770429805)

6. Wrath of a Mad God, Raymond E. Feist
(HarperCollins, $27.95 cl, 9780060792985)

7. Dragons of the Highlord Skies, Margaret Weis
(Wizards of the Coast/H.B. Fenn and Company, $9.99 mm, 9780786948604)

8. Belladonna, Anne Bishop
(Roc/Penguin, $7.99 mm, 9780451461544)

9. Confessor, Terry Goodkind
(Tor Books/H.B. Fenn, $32.95 cl, 9780765315236)

10. White Night, Jim Butcher
(Roc/Penguin, $10.99 mm, 9780451461551)

11. Forest Mage, Robin Hobb
(Eos/HarperCollins, $10.99 mm, 9780060758295)

12. The Ancient, R.A. Salvatore
(Tor Books/H.B. Fenn, $28.95 cl, 9780765317896)

13. Phantom, Terry Goodkind
(Tor Books/H.B. Fenn, $10.99 mm, 9780765344328)

14. Undead, Richard Lee Byers
(Wizards of the Coast/H.B. Fenn, $8.99 mm, 9780786947836)

15. The Outlaw Demon Wails, Kim Harrison
(Eos/HarperCollins, $26.95 cl, 9780060788704)

16. A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin
(Bantam Books/Random House, $10.99 mm, 9780553573404)

17. A Feast for Crows, George R.R. Martin
(Bantam Books/Random House, $10.99 mm, 9780553582024)

18. Flight of the Nighthawks, Raymond E. Feist
(Eos/HarperCollins, $10.99 mm 9780060792794)

19. Knights of the Black and White, Jack Whyte
(Penguin Canada, $13.50 mm+, 9780143017363)

20. Shadowplay, Ted Williams
(DAW/Penguin, $15.95 pa, 9780756404710)

Hi all –

I’ve decided to make my story “Saturn in G Minor” available online for your consideration during the voting period for this year’s Prix Aurora Awards. You can find the full text of the story here.

“Saturn in G Minor” is a finalist in the Best Short-Form Work in English category and has previously won the Writers of the Future Grand Prize.

Voting can be done here and all ballots must be received by 7 May 2008. Any Canadian citizen or permanent resident is eligible to vote; there is a $5 fee to vote, which helps cover administration of the contest and production of the statues.

Enjoy!

– S.

Hi all –

After some initial technical snafus (understandable given this is the first year with electronic voting) online voting and mail-in ballots are now available for the 2008 Prix Aurora Awards.

You can find the online form and/or the PDF for the mail-in ballots here. You can pay the $5 voting fee via PayPal (for online votes) or by cheque payable to Prix Aurora Awards (for mail-in ballots).

Looks like the online voting is a two-step process and a bit complicated. If you’re going to vote online be sure to read all the instructions carefully.

If you read my blog at all you know that my story “Saturn in G Minor” is a finalist in the Best Short-Form Work in English category. You can find the story here. The story has previously won the Writers of the Future Grand Prize.

It turns out that there will NOT be on-site voting at KEYCON 25 so get your votes in early. Votes must be received by 7 May 2008.

– S.